On 29 August, Toyota halted 12 of its 14 Japan-based car assembly plants due to an undefined system malfunction.

As one of the largest automakers in the world, the situation caused production output losses of roughly 13,000 cars daily, threatening to impact exports to the global market.

In a statement released today on Toyota's Japanese news portal, the company said the malfunction occurred during a planned IT systems maintenance event on 27 August. The scheduled maintenance was to organise the data and deletion of fragmented data in a database.

However, as the storage was filled before the completion of the tasks, an error occurred, causing the system to shut down. This shutdown directly impacted the company's production ordering system, so no production tasks could be planned and executed.

Toyota said its main servers and backup machines operate on the same system. Due to this, both systems faced the same failure, making a switchover impossible, inevitably leading to a halt in factory operations.

The restoration came on 29 August, when Toyota's IT team had prepared a larger capacity server to accept the partially transferred data two days back. This allowed Toyota's engineers to restore the production ordering system and the plants to resume operations.